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Groucho Marx’s Republican Party

Of greatest concern to Republicans should be the Hispanic vote – an ascendant voting bloc that is expected to double in size over the next generation. The Pew Hispanic Center projects that by 2030, 40 million Hispanics will be eligible to vote—up from 27 million today. Since George W. Bush’s 2004 election, Hispanic voters have abandoned the Republican Party in droves. Republicans’ ongoing attempts to thwart immigration reform this year in Congress are likely to drive the party’s support among Hispanic voters even lower.

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Compounding Republicans’ problems with minority voters is the party’s growing challenge with younger voters. Democrats have carried the youth vote in every presidential election since 1992, creating an entire generation of Democratic-leaning voters.

In 2012, Obama won the youth vote by 23 points—60 percent to 37 percent. Many of these young voters were drawn to the Democratic Party by Obama’s historic candidacy in 2008, as well as by their opposition to the Bush/Cheney administration’s positions on the wars and on social issues.

The GOP’s deficit with young voters is likely to grow. A recent Pew Research Center report, Millennials and Adulthood, found that Millennials are more progressive than any previous generation—particularly on social issues. Republicans’ positions on issues like gay marriage, women’s health, global warming and the legalization of marijuana are anathema to young people, as the RNC’s own autopsy report acknowledges: “in every session with young voters, social issues were at the forefront of the discussion…. [M]any see them as the civil rights issue of our time.”

The same Pew report found that only 17 percent of Millennials currently identify themselves as Republicans. Absent a change in their policy positions, it’s hard to see how Republicans will close the gap with these Millennials—particularly since their generation is expected to become a growing share of the electorate. Right now, young voters constitute 25.5 percent of the eligible electorate, a figure that will rise to 36.5 percent by 2020.

The math looks even more daunting for Republicans when you’re looking at the Electoral College. How things change: As early as 1964, Republicans began to solidify their hold throughout the South following the passage of the Civil Rights Act. By the beginning of the ‘80s Republicans were thought to have a “lock” on the Electoral College. Immigration was already undermining that, to the extent that despite Dukakis’ weak candidacy in 1988, he still managed to secure 111 electoral votes against George H.W. Bush.

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1984: Reagan’s re-election was effectively secured before it ever began. He started the year with a 55 percent job approval, which never dropped below 50 percent the entire year. In Gallup’s last pre-election poll, Reagan’s 58 percent job-approval rating mirrored his final 58 percent vote against Democratic challenger Walter Mondale, and he carried 49 states with 525 electoral votes.

1996: Two factors ensured that Bill Clinton’s re-election was never really in question: 1) his strong job performance as president by the end of his third year in office, and 2) the Republican-led shutdown of the federal government at the end of 1995. Following Clinton’s 1996 State of the Union address, his job-approval rating held steady at 50 percent or above for the entire year.

On Election Day, Clinton won re-election over Bob Dole with 49 percent of the vote, carrying 31 states (plus D.C.) with 379 electoral votes.

2012: In early August 2011, many pundits started writing Obama off as a one-term president when his support dropped to 40 percent. Several factors, however, positioned Obama to eventually cruise to a relatively easy re-election. First, he remained personally popular and his job performance steadily increased to around 50 percent and higher throughout 2012.

And, second, the Obama team ran a once-in-a-generation campaign, while Romney emerged from the weak field as a damaged general-election candidate. By the time Romney had secured the nomination, the contours of the election had already been set in Obama’s favor.

Obama went on to beat Romney by nearly four percentage points, picking up 332 electoral votes.

Democrats went on to expand their political base beyond New England, the mid-Atlantic, and the West Coast while they solidified their hold on the industrial Midwest. Population growth and shifts in the fast-growing states in the inter-mountain West—including New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado—as well as in states bordering the deep South—including Florida, North Carolina and Virginia—allowed Democratic-leaning states to become base states and some Republican-leaning states to become toss-ups, greatly expanding Democrats’ targets of opportunity. Due to these changing demographics, even historically bright red states such as Arizona and Georgia, and eventually Texas, will increasingly become more competitive for Democrats.

In each of the past six presidential elections, Democrats have carried 18 states—which currently total 242 electoral votes—as base states, leaving them only 28 votes short of the 270 necessary to win the White House. Three of these base states—California, New York and Illinois—alone total 104 electoral votes. Even when Republicans have won, their ceiling of electoral votes has been relatively low, leaving them a very small margin for error. Since 1988, no Republican candidate has managed to secure 300 electoral votes in a single election.

The GOP’s state of disarray

Today, the Republicans’ favorability rating is at record-low levels.

A March ABC/Washington Post poll found that 68 percent of respondents believe that the Republican Party is out of touch with the concerns of most people today (only 28 percent say that it is in touch).

The party’s current disarray was on full display during its “official” responses to this year’s State of the Union address—all four of them. Following a Republican House Conference retreat earlier last month, the New York Times aptly summed up the party’s status in one line: “House Republicans ended a three-day retreat here united in their division.”

The outside-the-Beltway, Tea Party-inspired takeover of the party is almost complete. These conservative interests have already taken control of the U.S. Republican House Caucus. Despite Speaker Boehner’s early attempts to work with Democrats in the House, hard-right leaders of the movement have gained virtual veto power over the Republicans’ major policy positions, as evidenced by last fall’s government shutdown. (The political damage from those efforts was so severe that Boehner was able to push through a budget deal over Tea Party objections, but his failure on immigration reform is a reminder of who’s really calling the shots.)

In the Senate, there’s little doubt that the right wing will take working control of the Republican Senate Caucus after the 2014 elections. For the past year Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been in a state of paralysis while he deals with a Tea Party challenger back home in Kentucky. The challenge has forced McConnell to avoid taking any positions that might come anywhere close to the political middle in order to avoid inflaming Rand Paul voters.

Conservative and Tea Party interests have also overwhelmingly dominated the Republican independent political organizations that emerged following the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. As pointed out by the RNC’s Growth and Opportunity report, “The handful of friends and allied groups dominating our side’s efforts… [are not] healthy…. A lot of centralized authority in the hands of a few people at these outside organizations is dangerous to our party.”

In recent years, the right has been more focused on burying the establishment wing of the party instead of developing a coherent organizing strategy to win elections. Starting with the 2012 elections, conservatives have plowed large amounts of ideological money into primaries to take out more establishment and mainstream candidates. A Feb. 1st Washington Post story noted that GOP super PACs and nonprofits spent almost $36 million in 2012 in Republican primary races across the country.

Doug Sosnik is a Democratic political strategist. He was formerly political director in President Bill Clinton’s White House.